Philip Larkin: is this poet just too weird for Horror/Fantasy/Science Fiction/Weird?

Since the French Revolution, the radical has become the default setting of the intellectual, especially in Arts and Letters.

The “conservative social order” has religion, but the “far more complex liberal worldview” has poetry and art. The early 19th century Romantics were “radical” individualists,” in mid-19th century France “radical” art and poetry were born, and then, in the early 20th century, after a Victorian detour, all hell broke loose.

The New Radical Order has been around for more than a hundred years now, and the Radical Artist institutionalized in academia since the mid-20th century and accepted as the norm, and quite frankly, the whole “Radical” thing has become tiresome—and cries out for a new definition.

No one wants to be called “reactionary” or “Far Right,” and neither do we. God forbid we bring down the Radical edifice for any but the best and most sincere motives!

Arts & Letters has become so Left-wing these days, that American intellectuals can call “American corporate liberalism” fascist and no one blinks an eye.

It isn’t so much that art has been beaten to a pulp by radical politics, but that art and politics have become indistinguishable. In art, a standard of beauty has been replaced by a standard of progress. The very word “aesthetics” comes from the word, beauty, but art is no longer concerned with beauty, but with an idea that belongs to practical and moral improvements.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with progress. But the issue for the arts and for intellectuality is more complex than that—which even members of the far left must confront.

The lion, politics, has consumed the gazelle (art). This is going to happen when you put them in the same cage. Politics is immense, and is constantly seeking to consolidate its gains. The more advanced and progressive a society becomes, the more its political order consolidates and purifies its message, feeding on everything else in society, until everyone from the housewife to the college professor to the mathematician to the poet to the architecht to the supermarket manager gets swept up in the democratic ideals of progress: let’s all improve ourselves together. This phrase may seem rather banal, but it’s a “shock of the new” idea, because it wasn’t that long ago that improvements came from afar, and citizens were morally isolated from each other.

But what are the vectors of progress? Do they always move forward, even in the world of hard, practical reality?

We have today possibly what many might call, “reverse-racism,” but even more prevalent is what we might call reverse-progress.

The wish to “save the planet” is a new and wild frontier piece of radical group-think that has one understandable goal: to reverse Man’s previous progress in subduing nature “red in tooth and claw.”

Depending on how large an historical time-line one uses, all sorts of “progressive” points of view are actually “reverse-progressive.”

In politics: Abolishing or weakening the nation state can be seen as reverse-progressive, since the modern nation state is historically the recent vehicle of human progress from feudalism to modern democracy.

In art: Alexander Pope’s triumph in meter/rhyme was the result of progress in poetry away from prose, but a little more than a century later, “progress” assumed that poetry should travel from Pope back again to the looseness of prose—even when prose was making progress in other genres at the same time.

In the interest of novelty, fashions and taste will change, and all sorts of arguments can be made for this or that type of “progress,” but we can see that progress does not always move forward—and yet we assume that the “progressive” left always does.

We do not know if certain desired goals of “progressive movements” in politics will amount to real improvements: universal voting does not necessarily improve government, since pandering to mass ignorance becomes the rule. Laws of equal opportunity are vital, but groups are different within themselves and, if we are honest, impossible to define.

How, then, can we say that political progress will match up with artistic progress at all, when the progress of both are so complex and do not line up? We radically err in assuming this relationship is simple.

Given these questions, we noted with interest a recent article in the Guardian: “The Weird Deserves Recognition As A Major Literary Movement,” especially this passage:

The weird is characterized by a willingness to play fast and loose with reality. And its emergence in the early 1900s coincides with a radical shift in our perception of what reality is. Science at the time was busy revealing not just that our universe was much, much bigger than we had guessed, but also far less certain, with the principles of quantum mechanics suggesting that God did indeed “play dice with the universe.” We were also becoming aware that many things we accepted as real—ideas of nationality, race, gender, sexuality, and many more—were in fact socially constructed. The conservative social order in which people knew their place was about to be replaced with a far more complex and less certain liberal worldview.

The weird became both a part of these radical changes, and a reaction against them. JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a paean for the return of a king and a social order that was undergoing radical and irrevocable change. As becomes apparent in his racist poetry, HP Lovecraft’s stories articulated a very deep anxiety and fear of social change. The commercial genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror that commoditise the weird are often reactionary in nature. Faced with a rift in reality, they encourage the reader to dive for cover.

When it comes to the Weird genre, here is a typical strategy by the leftist intellectual: grab land for the empire of “social change.” Call out the reactionary authors: Tolkien and Lovecraft, equate “fear of social change” with the freaky fear-factor of the genre itself, take a swipe at the “commercial” aspect of the genre.

Bingo. The flag of “social change” is planted on Horror/Fantasy/SciFi and the Weird.

The person who is simply homosexual is different from the political homosexual; the political homosexual is opposed by an ‘other’ and the opposition and the fear of this other is at the heart of all Weird literature, if not all literature.

Yet gender and sexuality have had oppositon at their heart since before the rape of Helen.

The Guardian author, then, is not really saying anything new. The leftist intellectual argument for progress is not wrong. It is merely empty. The leftist is not wrong: the racist is bad. “The racist is bad,” however, does not fit neatly into p.c. formulae for literary or scientific use.

We do not wish harmony between Right and Left. Let us leave the Right to wallow in its backwardness and prejudice. But let us recognize that the Left assumes too much by inserting one dimensional moral principles into everything. The default setting of avant-leftism has long lost its way. We suggest no mingling within the Right/Left oppositon. We suggest the whole opposition’s hard shell be exploded. Let us look for new ways (taking into account the old) of expressing the whole problem.

The Guardian author says that “God does not always play with dice,” but if this is true, how does a random universe support the idea of bedrock leftist principles? And if “social construction” is imposed on chaos, which is more true, the chaos, or the social construction; or is the truth the competition between various social constructions?

And here we are back at primitive “opposition,” again. “Social change” is not simple. We should always be suspicious of “new politics.”

The Guardian author says “the Weird deserves recognition as a major literary movement.” First, this plea sounds suspiciously (ironically?) Market-driven. Secondly, the Weird “movement” is already “major” and has always existed, though perhaps not in the narrow manner the Guardian author would like.

Fantasy/Weird author Edgar Poe, who perished mysteriously this week back in 1849, has often been called “reactionary” by agents of “social change.” Poe invented and transcended so many genres that he resists easy definitions, and the scholarly animosty towards him in many quarters may be chiefly for that reason alone. Poe, the “reactionary,” makes the radical Language Poet, for instance, seems narrow and small.

We close with a right-wing poet’s poem which brilliantly does what Wordsworth and Coleridge separately attempted in Lyrical Ballads: make the plain fantastic and make the fantastic plain. No horror/fantasy poem, this. Yet the poet’s simple, honest observation makes this poem as Weird as any. The category-busting poet is Philip Larkin. The poem is “The Old Fools.”

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching the light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange;
Why aren’t they screaming?

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines –
How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.

Since there is no earthly good in frightening someone—except, perhaps, for science, or for a laugh—it is safe to say good literature will never be frightening, for it naturally follows that what we call ‘good’ must have something good about it.

The “fright industry” claims a great swath of schlocky middle-brow art and entertainment, from Boris Karloff to Rob Zombie, from Dracula to Death Metal, from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. For many, skull-fashion is cool and slasher films are a hoot.

But high-brow art is not necessarily good, and the broad appeal of horror, with its excess and sometimes its accompanying humor, is a fertile field for a certain amount of aesthetic experimentation. Poe built whole systems around the melancholy and the somber; his ghouls were never ghouls unless they served an aesthetic purpose; as science explored smaller and more defined spaces, Poe did the same in literature. Always the artist, in his Philosophy of Composition, Poe wrote:

The next point to be considered was the mode of bringing together the lover and the Raven — and the first branch of this consideration was the locale. For this the most natural suggestion might seem to be a forest, or the fields — but it has always appeared to me that a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident: — it has the force of a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral power in keeping concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with mere unity of place.

Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son and film noir share a shadowy aesthetic. Shadow belongs to art and science. Imagination works in the dark, and Faith lives there, as well. It isn’t only horror that likes the dark.

I can’t imagine John Ashbery or John Bernstein trying to write a scary poem. Perhaps they are wise not to—the scary is equated with the worst kind of camp, and if a poet has no broad appeal to begin with, it would be suicidal to one’s high-brow reputation to go the low-brow route to gain readers.

Poe knew that horror was best evoked in homely, not poetic terms:

My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified — have tortured — have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror — to many they will seem less terrible than barroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place — some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.

True, this is the narrator of “The Black Cat” speaking, and not Poe, but Poe understood that horror didn’t sit well with the Muse. There’s a reason why Thomas Lovell Beddoes and John Clare are minor Romantics. The poet who scares himself and tries to scare others is never going to be a major poet. The major poet transforms the terrible into beauty or laughter, and laughter and the beautiful can be terrible, even as it neutralizes the terror.

Every major writer occasionally wanders into the realm of bad taste.

The minor writers do it more often, and that’s why they are minor. And nothing screams ‘bad taste’ like only being scary, or disgusting, or offensive.

A ghost story is one thing, but what about a ghost poem? How easy would it be for a John Ashbery or Charles Bernstein to write a ghost poem? And what obstacles would stand in their way?

A rather recent Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series book, Poems Bewitched and Haunted, selected and edited by the late John Hollander, with his own translations of Heine, Goethe, Verlaine, and Baudelaire (Hollander left the translations of Classical authors to others) is a dashing little Halloween volume, bound and printed nicely with an orange ribbon bookmark, a steal at $12.50. (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

Hollander made selections based on his own high-brow taste, and his bewitched and haunted poems are also 99% verse. Apparitions, witches, ghosts, and love’s revenge are the rule, rather than horror or fright for its own sake. A poem by Swinburne is the most horrific, featuring a woman who feeds her children to her husband and his new bride. Most of the poems are ‘ghostly’ in a Victorian manner.

Hollander obviously subscribes to the idea that rhymes and verse-chants have a haunted quality in themselves.

Scattered throughout the volume are many exquisite lines. Not many poems are excellent throughout; one gets the idea the poet often felt a little ashamed of his spooky ballad, and hence failed to put in the necessary work to bring it to completion. Or, fear made the poet nervous, fear of being blasphemous, and writing it down forever; because, after all, the haunted implies a wrong that we can’t shake off, and maybe the very task itself rattles the poet.

Many were hesitant in the superstitious, ancient days to conjure ghosts; then modern delight in ghosts fled into prose. The pagan poems are full of ghosts, but that makes translation into English necessary, and English poems that are truly ghostly are few. We’ve got Macbeth, we’ve got Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the Romantic sublime, which tends to be more pantheistc than ghostly, the Victorians, who often fail because their versifying is unimaginative, and then by the time we reach the Moderns, all that superstitious stuff has been cast out.

There is a story that a poet went to an old master for advice and got only this: “Work on your lighting.” There is a certain palpable ingredient which no poem requires so much as the ghost poem.

A haunted poem requires cinematic aplomb, a focus of story, a sly impetus of tension which can’t be faked or personalized away. A ghost poem either works, or it doesn’t; the sublime (on some level) must be reached, and one silly part, or a lack of finish, can spell failure. If a ghost poem takes itself too seriously, it will fail. If a ghost poem doesn’t take itself seriously enough, it will fail, too. The ordinary poem makes its own rules as it goes, forming itself on the force of the modern poet’s personality. The ghost poem, on the other hand, has a history: Virgil’s “Aeneas Meets His Dead Wife” (in this volume) is one example, and the ghost poem also has expectations: certain rules have to be obeyed, even as new ones need to be made.

Thomas Hood has two of the best poems in the volume. A neglected poet who Poe claimed was too fond of puns, Hood shows that he can do the haunted poem in mode serious or funny.

Those who object to John Whitcomb Riley’s poem should read it out-loud to appreciate its excellence. The Ella Wilcox poem is also an anti-war poem. Robert Graves has a great idea: no more ghosts.

Witches could be said to represent men’s fear of women, women who “can’t be satisfied,” as Led Zeppelin put it, but Shelley writes of a beautiful and beneficial witch, Shelley too much of a gentleman to demean the feminine.

We’d like to share Coleridge’s simple “Phantom,” which is not often reproduced:

All look and likeness caught from earth,
All accident of kin and birth,
Had pass’d away. There was no trace
Of aught on that illumined face,
Uprais’d beneath the rifted stone
But of one spirit all her own;-
She, she herself, and only she,
Shone through her body visibly.

Robert Frost’s “Pauper Witch of Grafton” we had no patience for—nor the two Vachel Lindsay selections—that man had no reason to write verse. Two E.A. Robinson poems likewise were not good enough to be included. Thomas Hardy (3 poems) also failed to impress.

Tristan Corbiere’s, translated by Hollander, is a fetid little poem.

But some prefer this:

Evil Landscape

Sands of old bones—the rattling wave’s
Dead-march, bursting noise on noise
Pale swamps where the moon consumes
Enormous worms to pass the night.

The white Laundress lays outspread
The dirty linens of the dead
In the wolves’ sunlight…sorrowful
Little singers now, the toads,
Poison, with colic of their own,
The mushrooms that they sit upon.

–Corbiere

to this:

In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tentanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion—
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!

And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms, that move fantasically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh—but smile no more.

(first stanza and last staza of Poe’s “Haunted Palace”)

Poe’s poem is a masterpiece because of its music, and that music’s fruit is in the unusual shape of its stanza, with lines of varying lengths.

The Modernists rejected verse as monontonous, and they were partly right to do so; but instead of expanding the possibilities of verse, they retreated into prose. At the crossroads, Poe, in his verse, in his Philosophy of Composition, The Poetic Principle, and The Rationale of Verse, argued that vigilant experimentation could make verse continually interesting.

The enemy of verse is not free verse, nor bad verse, but the equation in people’s minds of bad verse with verse.

“Windy Nights” by Robert Louis Stevenson, chosen by Hollander for his book, is an example of bad verse, or doggerel:

Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Whenever the trees are crying aloud,
And ships are tossed at sea,
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then
By he comes back at the gallop again.

Even this has movement and interest, but compared to the Poe, it simply “gallops about.”

John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), in his poem, “Spectral Lovers,” shows the richness possible for even a modern poet who experiments with stanza:

By night they haunted a thicket of April mist,
As out of the rich ground strangely come to birth,
Else two immaculate angels fallen on earth,
Lovers, they knew they were, but why unclasped, unkissed?
Why should two lovers go frozen asunder in fear?
And yet they were, they were.

Over the shredding of an April blossom
Her thrilling fingers touched him quick with care,
Of many delicate postures she cast a snare;
But for all the red heart beating in the pale bosom,
Her face as of cunningly tinctured ivory
Was hard with an agony.

Stormed by the little batteries of an April night,
Passionate being the essence of the field,
Should the penetrable walls of the crumbling prison yield
And open her treasure to the first clamorous knight?
‘This is the mad moon, and must I surrender all?
If he but ask it, I shall.’

And gesturing largely to the very moon of Easter,
Mincing his steps, and swishing the jubilant grass,
And beheading some field-flowers that had come to pass,
He had reduced his tributaries faster,
Had not considerations pinched to his heart
Unfitly for his art.

‘Am I reeling with the sap of April like a drunkard?
Blessed is he that taketh this richest of cities;
But it is so stainless, the sack were a thousand pities;
This is that marble fortress not to be conquered,
Lest its white peace in the black flame turn to tinder
And an unutterable cinder.’

They passed me once in April, in the mist.
No other season is it, when one walks and discovers
Two clad in the shapes of angels, being spectral lovers,
Trailing a glory of moon-gold and amethyst,
Who touch their quick fingers fluttering like a bird
Whose songs shall never be heard.

We’ll close with Adelaide Crapsey’s “The Witch:”

When I was a girl by Nilus stream
I watched the desert stars arise;
My lover, he who dreamed the Sphinx,
Learned all his dreaming from my eyes.

I bore in Greece a burning name,
And I have been in Italy
Madonna to a painter-lad,
And mistress to a Medici.

And have you heard (and I have heard)
Of puzzled men with decorous mien,
Who judged—The wench knows far too much—
And burnt her on the Salem green?

In 1939, a transition year marking the start of WW II, the poet W.H. Auden was divided.

Auden was between jobs, homelands, faiths, political beliefs, romances–as well as drags on his cigarette.

The English poet was about to settle in the U.S. (New York) say goodbye to friend Christopher Isherwood (who moved to California in April) meet and“marry” Chester Kallman–a devotee of anonymous men’s room sex, abandon his atheism for the Church of England, give up his Marxism for a belief in Western Democracy, and abandon travel reporting for college teaching.

In a Nation article in March 1939, Auden played prosecutor and defense—rhetorically dividing himself—in debating the poetic worth of W.B. Yeats–who had died in January of that year.

Yeats’ death surely made Auden, famous and middle-aged in 1939, reflect on his own worth as a poet, and, naturally on the worth of poetry itself in a brutal age approaching war.

Are we surprised, then, that poetry’s most divided and ambiguous statement about itself, emerged in March of 1939, in a poem by Auden on W.B. Yeats?

We really don’t need to puzzle over the meaning of “Poetry makes nothing happen,” for it is clearly the utterance of a helplessly divided and self-pitying man: “Poetry makes Auden happen” is closer to an accurate statement, for poetry makes a great deal happen. Auden, the famous poet, felt sorry for himself as he contemplated the death of another well-known poet (Yeats) falling like a tiny droplet in the ocean, a day when a “few thousand” were aware of something “slightly unusual.”

Or, if Auden wasn’t pitying himself, the phrase probably sprang from Auden’s sense–which one can detect in the Nation article–that Yeats was (and this is probably correct) a right-wing loon; “poetry makes nothing happen” was a description of Yeats’ poetry, not poetry.

Auden looked around at the world in 1939 and said, rather gruffly, after smoking a pack of cigarettes with a few Pinot Noirs, ‘look, Yeats believed in fairies and Hitler is about to set the world on fire…

It was Yeats–Auden thought he was a freak.

Auden knew poetry–in general–made things happen.

After all, poetry created the poet, Auden, who made the ambiguous statement, ‘poetry makes nothing happen,’ in the first place.

We should remember that poetry is much larger than W.H. Auden or W.B. Yeats, or any individual, and that sordid details and facts pale beside universals, and small facts can suddenly become universals, depending on the context. We should remember what Percy Shelley, whose poetic treatment of the death of John Keats blows away Auden’s ditty on Yeats, said in his A Defense of Poetry:

“The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live.” –Shelley, A Defense

A long poet does not exist.

Sure, a poem, or a poet, or poetry might–sometimes–make nothing happen.

Fairy dust and puffs of smoke make nothing happen. Most of us know that.

But, again, Shelley:

“The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples, in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.” –Shelley, A Defense

ALL communication is a warning.

The more articulate a person, the more they are experiencing what they are warning us about.

All information presupposes danger. The menu cries out against the horror of starvation–the diet warns of the menu. The chef who starves cooks best.

Priests are unable to warn directly, since the more articulate the priest, the more that priest personally knows the very sin against which their sermon is a warning.

The dilemma of the articulate priest is at the heart of all moral philosophy and its intellectual, political, cultural, and pedagogical conflicts.

Loyalty is the quality which attempts to stave off this conflict. Loyalty to group or tribe warns against the dilemma of the articulate priest. The truly articulate priest disrupts loyalty and its certainties; this is why prophets are hated in their own land.

Paglia is the Barren Mother and the Breeding Virgin of intellectual culture.

She is a lustful Socrates, whose questing, intellectual advocacy is centered on ecstatic pleasures and sexual beauty–hers is a warning against what she, personally, has secretly suffered: chastity.

Obviously it’s nobody’s business how much someone gets laid, but my thesis is based on a guess that during Paglia’s development as a young person, she didn’t get laid. This was both her strength and her weakness.

Paglia fell in love at a very early age with Amelia Earhart’s lone flights—the poem “Alone” by Edgar Poe probably best sums up her soul. Paglia was a virgin during the 60s and adopted the brazen lesbian role as a graduate student to hide the shame of her uncool virginity.

Paglia, the scholar of sex, shone, as the scholar, herself, remained virginal, or, if not virginal, deeply ashamed of losing out to more successful schmoozers in sex and career.

The virgin is alone more profoundly when surrounded, and not barred from, sexual activity. For whatever reason, actual sex wasn’t a fit, so Paglia became an artistic fan of pornography—but not out of a feeling of deficiency, for she was an Amelia Earhart in her soul, flying above the boorish crowd.

We warn of what we know—the awed, hurting mind produces what the sensual, happy mind cannot.

Sexual Personae marked the start of a brilliant career. Her gadfly presence in magazines and the lecture circuit, in the wake of the success of her historical treatise, was truly exciting. But the promised second volume of Sexual Personae never arrived. Then she began to write on politics, speaking of presidents and secretaries of state as if she were making snarky judgments at a high school dance. It never quite rang true.

Paglia also boxed herself in as a hater of ‘French Theory;’ it was always obvious to me this prejudice of hers was linked to her mentor, Harold Bloom, who, like many academics, is explicitly pro-Emerson/anti-Poe, and this Anglophone school can never forgive the French for loving Poe.

Then she took five years to write Break, Blow, Burn, her book on poetry, a tepid close-reading exercise of some of her favorite poems.

How in the world did the author of Sexual Personae morph into Cleanth Brooks?

And five years…think of it. That’s the writing career of Keats, the recording career of the Beatles (almost), the entire career of the Doors, to take a few dozen short poems, many loved and adored since childhood, and riff on them…this took five years?

Couldn’t most of us do this in a week?

Paglia still blogs on Salon and most readers hate her; the consensus of Salon readers seems to be, I HATE THIS B***, FIRE HER!!!

Which is great. We at Scarriet understand. But what happened to you, Camille?

HORROR, the genre, must be horrible because horror, the reality, stalks us daily; the relief of laughter, and the relief of revery inspired by beauty, both exist partially as an antidote to anxiety. Directly confronting fear (in a horror film, for instance) triggers a physical response which competes with laughter–a bodily response–and pleasurable swooning–also a physical response. The comedic, the beautiful and the horrific are sisters. Art deftly combines them, and the skill in combining these three marks the great artist.

Fictional horror gives a crude psycho-physical pleasure in the use of contrast as it diminishes the banal horror of ordinary worries and anxiety–the less intense dread we feel in varying degrees in our own lives.

The cure is the poison itself; fear in life seeks out more intense fear in stories; ironically, more palpable fear comes to us through fiction; the horror genre is a vaccine of ‘dead’ (fictive) horror for our ‘live’ (real) anxieties.

But why does horror have to be horrible when it can be comedic and beautiful too–and not merely full of horror? We can have our poem and eat it; the art that is beautiful and comedic and terrifying all at once is the greatest gift art can give.

Alfred Hitchcock won no Oscars, and the terrifying film “Bright Star” will win none, and Poe, who they say ‘is not really that scary’ (of course not! his genius was not merely out to scare) was the Hitchcock of his day, winning no ‘Oscars’ (Poe was shut out by the literary establishment, despite his popularity). I’ll name one more figure who fits into the category of aesthetic balance–and for that reason gets rejected by various camps: Camille Paglia. A highly controversial, contradictory, but rich, thinker, (who has wasted her talent on political blogging to some extent) Paglia provides more than single-genre types can chew on.

On this Halloween, here’s to celebrating books, films, and art that are scary, funny and beautiful in tasteful, ingenious combination.

Take fright and add a little light.The dark doesn’t have to be so stark.